Quote Originally Posted by rouvio View Post
wonder why they really did that if the card can easily go over 900MHz.
I mean.. this card is intended for the hardcore gamers.. right?

I think that a person spending over 600$ for a GPU has enough airflow in his/her computer case to compensate for the heat generated by the "extra" few MHz's..
Directly from horse's mouth "ATI was adamant that OEMs didn’t play the deciding role this time around. While OEMs feelings regarding a 300W+ board certainly were a concern, ATI says the primary reason why they decided not to opt for the full 5870 speeds and feeds for the 5970 was they wanted to maintain compatibility with the existing power supply infrastructure.

Quite simply, ATI didn’t want users to potentially have to upgrade their PSU (power supply unit) just to run the 5970. They wanted the card to be compatible with as wide a variety of PSUs as possible. Therefore in order to make the card work with as wide a variety of PSUs as possible, while still retaining as much of the 5870’s performance, ATI opted to deliver a card with the full 1600 shaders as the 5870, but with the 5850’s clock speeds.
"

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...view/page2.asp

Their nice way of saying : We gotta account for the noobs out there with crappy psu's trying to run this.